1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for deciding a traveling direction in a space; and more particularly, relates to a method and an apparatus for utilizing a plurality of network nodes to decide a traveling direction.
2. Descriptions of the Related Art
Nowadays, parking lots exist almost everywhere in metropolitan areas. These parking lots, no matter indoors or outdoors, are all evolving towards an automatic nature, and most of them have already charging fees in an automatic way. However, for large parking lots, guiding services are still required to help drivers to find an available parking space in a shortest time when entering a parking lot and to find their cars immediately when leaving there. This has become a main aspect to be researched for further improving parking services.
As the GPS technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated in recent years, some service providers in the art have attempted to adopt this technology in parking services. Unfortunately, application of GPS is only limited to outdoor parking lots where a good GPS signal can be received. Therefore, the parking guide services provided in this way are mostly limited to informing drivers where a parking lot is available, and fail to provide ideal and complete solutions of parking guide and car searching services for indoor parking lots.
Furthermore, parking guide services provided in conventional parking lots are mostly limited to informing drivers whether empty parking spaces exist in the parking lot, in a specific region and/or at a specific floor. Under such circumstances, drivers who have no means to know the precise position of an empty parking space; they have to spend time in searching the exact position of the available parking space, which is very inconvenient.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,107,942 discloses a parking guide management system. A method used by the system to detect an empty parking space is to install video cameras above parking spaces and acquire images the parking spaces periodically. Then, a comparison is made between associated images to determine if an individual parking space is empty. However, this method is disadvantageous in that it requires many video cameras, which tends to drive the cost considerably higher especially for large parking lots.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,650,250 discloses a parking guide system and a computer application thereof. This system indicates empty parking spaces to drivers by sensing the number of empty parking spaces and parking regions with empty parking spaces, and transmitting a graphic signal or a voice signal to the entrance. This method is disadvantageous in that drivers can only be informed of locations of empty parking spaces, but do not know traveling direction towards such parking spaces. Moreover, this method fails to provide a car searching service.
In summary, the prior art parking guide systems fail to provide precise information related to parking guide services, and are very expensive to implement. Furthermore, most of the prior art systems fail to provide a car searching service. In view of this, it is highly desirable in the art to provide a system for providing parking guide and car searching services with reduced cost and in a fast and convenient way.